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Reconsidering the Alternatives<br />
CONCLUSION<br />
Let us return to the metaphysical options enumerated in the introduction in order to see<br />
which remain viable in the face of all that has been said. Firstly, materialism has been elimi-<br />
nated by Chalmers’ supervenience argument – in other words, by the brute, surprising ex-<br />
istence of consciously experienced phenomenology. While the zombie seems logically im-<br />
possible to some, I can only conclude from my own judgement that those people suffer from<br />
either a lack of metaphysical imagination or a dogmatic attachment to materialism.<br />
Although Swinburne’s argument for substance dualism fails, this does not constitute an<br />
argument against the possibility. But substance dualism does run into trouble if we make the<br />
naturalist assumption, for it is difficult to see how scientific laws could bridge events in two<br />
completely separate metaphysical domains. Nonetheless, one could certainly conceive of<br />
such natural laws, however unusual they may seem in comparison to the rest of science.<br />
Idealism, despite its counter-intuitiveness, remains a live option for the broad-minded<br />
naturalist. Nothing about the world as empirically observed rules out the possibility that<br />
‘reality’ is nothing but the interaction and exchange of ideas, sensations and impressions.<br />
However, once one has incorporated the laws of physics into the idealist metaphysic, it is<br />
doubtful whether the resulting picture is distinguishable from neutral monism – by com-<br />
parison, a pure idealism such as that of Berkeley denies the existence of any nomological<br />
causal relationships between events.<br />
For the naturalist, therefore, the most plausible remaining options are property dualism<br />
and neutral monism – that there is a single substance that has either two separate, disjointed<br />
sets of properties or a single set of properties whose nature is yet to be understood. The two<br />
positions differ only over whether physical and phenomenal properties are ultimately re-<br />
ducible to a single unified psychophysical property or not. While neutral monism’s opti-<br />
mism results in a simpler ontological schema, it is left with the problem of explaining how<br />
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